Here in The Obsessive Reader's Cultured Ghetto you'll find literary musings and rants, online resources and original viewpoints from the wild, serendipitous, multicultural, book-loving universe of my life. Check out my blog list. Watch the video bars on these pages (screen appears in the upper right corner). Click on the hyper-links in postings for even more information. Become a FOLLOWER of the Obsessive Reader in her Cultured Ghetto. Feel free to share your COMMENTS. SUBSCRIBE VIA EMAIL.

Once you learn to read you will be forever free - Frederick Douglass

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Still Obsessively Writing!

A wonderful literary agent in New York City is reading my novel. As I am waiting for good news, I'm working on my next story. The Obsessive Reader will not be blogging in the foreseeable future as she devotes every available moment to her own books to be enjoyed by her fellow obsessive readers. With thanks and appreciation.

This has to be the best cover I've ever seen on a literary magazine - maybe any magazine - bar none. Perhaps it is a picture of justice...

A COMMON READER

If this is so, if to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism.We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics.But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance.The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field.If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work?And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.

Virginia Woolf,A Common Reader, Second Series, How Should One Read a Book?

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About Me

Susan D. Anderson is an obsessive reader, published writer, and special collections curator in a major university library. Her book, Nostalgia for a Trumpet: Poems of Memory and History, was published by Tia Chucha Press in 2008. Her poetry, short stories, essays and articles have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Massachusetts, Review, Five A.M., First Intensity, The Nation, the Black Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, the Xavier Review and Obsidian II, among other publications. In 2008, she received the "Best Blogger on Ethnic Perspectives Award" from New America Media for "The Reparations Chronicles" at theloop21.com. Susan is currently revising a novel for an interested agent. In the meantime, as The Obsessive Reader, she blogs on books and culture, giving readers access to online resources and original viewpoints they might not otherwise encounter.

Blog Archive

I've read widely in the world's literature, European, Asiatic, American, there are Buddhist reference points and mythologies in my poetry too. In other words, I cannot cut off and will not attempt to cut off what is my experience and what is after all, the world's experience. There is a great deal of intercommunication in the world. A lot of people tend to forget that.

Wole Soyinka

Jerusalem

Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes

Tofino

Kunming

Mumbai

I can read in red. I can read in blue.I can read in pickle color too.I can read in bed, and in purple, and in brown.I can read in a circle and upside down!I can read with my left eye. I can read with my right.I can read Mississippi with my eyes shut tight!

There are so many things you can learn about.But…you'll miss the best thingsIf you keep your eyes shut.The more that you read, the more things you will knowThe more that you learn, the more places you'll go.

If you read with your eyes shut you're likely to findThat the place where you're going is far, far behindSO…that's why I tell you to keep your eyes wide.Keep them wide open…at least on one side.